After the Andhra Pradesh crisis in 2010 hit, the extensive media coverage on predatory lending practices, coercive collection methods and resulting farmer suicides due to over indebtedness etched itself in public memory. Microfinance had promised the upliftment of the poor … Read More
Sa-Dhan – National Financial Inclusion Conference 2014 – Liveblog Series
Sa-Dhan hosted the 9th National Financial Inclusion Conference in Mumbai on March 14, last week. The conference was titled “Partnership and Future Growth: Challenges Ahead for the Microfinance Sector”. IFMR Research served as a Knowledge Partner at the event and … Read More
A Fresh Look at Informal Finance in Chennai
There is revived interest in the role of informal credit in India, with researchers using a variety of innovative tools to study informal products and their delivery channels. While the majority of informal loans may come from professional moneylenders, such lenders are … Read More
Microfinance India Summit 2013 – SHG Bank Linkage – Optimizing the Potential
Overview: With the large existing pool of SHGs and the expected growth, it is imperative that the role of SHGs is extended beyond (indirect) credit linkage, and strategies are developed to optimize their potential in enabling comprehensive financial inclusion of … Read More
Microfinance India Summit 2013 – Financial Inclusion Vision 2020
Overview: This session wil attempt to build a vision for financial inclusion in India, identify policy bottlenecks, strategies for convergence and incubation of innovations for sustained and durable outcomes towards mainstreaming the poor into formal financial systems. Moderator – N Srinivasan, Sector … Read More
Price Information: Leading to Roads Less Taken
For many of India’s 850 million rural inhabitants, 40 per cent of whom live in poverty, delivering agricultural output in a timely manner is a significant challenge. Poor infrastructure, lack of scale economies (70 per cent of landholdings are less … Read More
Comments on the Implementation of the Indian Government’s Welfare Schemes
The Centre for Micro Finance recently created a database of welfare schemes that have been launched by the Government of India; the database also has state and sector wise information for easier information retrieval. While working on the database, I … Read More
India’s Invisible Population
Photocredit: The Hindu Denying basic amenities to residents of ‘unrecognised’ slums is an affront to their dignity; resettling them fails to address their concerns and is unviable financially. Since 2005, the Central government has given significant amounts of money to … Read More
Impact of Access to Finance: Network Level Effects
Access to finance can have multiple effects on an individual’s life, especially on community behavior. Imagine that we had no banks, no financial services – Who would we borrow from? The rent that informal service providers can extract from their … Read More
KGFS Harvest Diary: Lessons From the Field
We continue our feature of the KGFS Impact Evaluation and follow from our previous post, which mentioned how KGFS researchers are customizing a harvest diary suited to the needs of the project. In the last post on Designing a Harvest … Read More